The fashionable thinking in agencies today is that people are controlled by their emotions, and that brands
need to get potential customers on board by owning
an emotion, or creating an emotional
bond with them.

So when a recent study to find out
thesecret of the UK’s happiest brands takes some
of our most treasured emotions – happiness, optimism, trust, playfulness,
generosity – and applies them to brands, it may seem par for the course [Be careful if you read the article, the startling revelation that people like chocolate and ice cream more than banks, political parties and Ryanair may make you fall off your chair].

However, by attempting to boil things down to an emotional essence we are in danger of simplifying humans and insulting their intelligence. And
in the process, agencies are totally misunderstanding how people come to buy
what they do, and how brands become popular and successful.

Unfortunately, this thinking tends
to over-emphasise the role that emotions plays in brand building, whilst
simultaneously depicting consumers as unthinking, emotionally-led zombies.

But why then has this thinking
become so popular?

The underlying theory is worth
looking at in a wider context, and examining where these ideas may have come from.

It does seems that some findings
from neuroscience have left the lab, passed through the lens of popular culture
and tiptoed into agencies, reappearing, often oversimplified, as seductive
reasons why the primary goal of ads should be attempting to make consumers feel
an emotion about the brand.

Neuromarketing and ‘buyologists’
(yes, really) today search for what they call the ‘buy button’ in our brains.
They are infatuated by the lighting-up in brain scans of that walnut-shaped bit
of our brain called the amygdala.

“Neuroscience shows us that the
decision to purchase something is often formed deep within the subconscious”
say Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience. “Consumer choice is an inescapable
biological process” claims NeuroFocus, a neuromarketing firm located in London.

And here is A.K. Pradeep, CEO of
NeuroFocus, in an interview with Fast Company, on the subject of the iPad,
"When you move an icon on the iPad and it does what you thought it would
do, you're surprised and delighted it actually happened," he says.
"That surprise and delight turns into a dopamine squirt, and you don't
even know why you liked it."

He talks as if the damn thing
doesn’t even work on a functional level, or lacks a rational purpose.

The view seems to be that there is no
room any more for human reasoning. To them we are biologically determined to
behave in certain ways. There is no room for autonomy or free will.

Interestingly when they are
challenged about this, they claim you are simply post-rationalising, the choice
was made by your objective brain and not your subjective mind.Worryingly, to them we are all mindless
zombies.

Noticeably, law firms have more
issues with this that ad firms.In
law, people are judged to be in control of their faculties unless demonstrated
otherwise – whereas ad-land seems to be taking the opposite view.

In fact neuro-marketers appear to
have more faith in neuroscience than neuroscientists. Raymond Tallis,
neuroscientist and humanist, “If human beings were so simple that they could be
understood in scientific terms alone, then we’d be too simple to be able to
understand ourselves.”

With over a billion neurons and
zillions of synapses in the brain, neuroscience is at its earliest stage of
understanding the most complex object in the known universe.

This misappropriation of
neuroscience (which I am sure will turn out to be of huge importance to
medicine eventually) by agencies and clients leads them to leap to the apparent
end conclusion of “Hey, why bother mentioning product attributes, or providing
any rationale to buy? Lets not bother with the conscious mind at all”.

Our own point of view is rather old-fashioned I’m afraid, and
empirically based. Brands are, in fact, built by the cumulative effects of
people purchasing and using products, which over time builds an emotional
attachment to the brand providing that product.

For now, at least, effective
advertising must be noticed (consciously), believed, remembered and acted upon
– as if that’s not enough of a challenge in this crowded, over-communicated
world. We maintain that behaviour change precedes attitude change not vice
versa.

We believe that ads should treat
people as reasoning subjects rather than passive objects. The thinking behind
an ad should start with what we know about the product and where it sits in its
category, why people might benefit from it and why people may choose it over
our competitors’ products.

Only once we have this
understanding do we think about how to have impact – by being entertaining, emotionally engaging, charming or unexpected.

Greedily, we want advertising to be
both rational (in what it communicates) and emotional (in how it demands
attention and interest, and stays in the memory).

Purely emotion-laden films with the
product as a mere afterthought are lazy shortcuts in advertising, and lack
empirical evidence as to how they get people to try their subject’s wares (and
keep them front of mind for future purchases).

In fact products are often invented
for a rational reason – to do something more efficiently or better, or
differently. And our non-zombie consumer understands this. It is most clearly
demonstrated in word-of-mouth, when one person advises another. They tend to
tell the other person the specific reason why they may like the product, rather
than they “will just love it”, or “get joy from it”, or “feel like a with-it
thirty something” for no given reason at all. Yet for some reason, advertisers
seem to treat this as too simplistic an approach for advertising.

We worry about the damaging
consequences for brands of forgoing their heritage or the actual function of
their product and replacing it with emotional brand qualities. We fear that in
an age where the consumer demands transparency and authenticity, they will be
seen as disingenuous in their desire to emotionally manipulate the audience. If
trust is key to advertisers, treating us as zombies is probably not the best
way.

Product advertising doesn’t have to
rely on boring technical jargon or corny metaphors, but it is often depicted as
such by those who prefer the emotional brand approach. It’s all too easy to
argue against it by using bad examples of the genre.

But we believe that the product
should more often play the lead and not just a walk-on role in smart,
compelling, entertaining advertising. It’s far from easy to do well, but it’s
not brain surgery either.

Let’s be mindful of the sort of
advertising we create and not treat people as mouth-breathing morons. People
are way smarter than most agencies are giving them credit for right now. It’s
time the industry started making smarter advertising that gives people a real
reason to believe.